Oh do stop blubbing! As a TV show reveals how we've become a nation of cry babies, PHILIP NORMAN says it's time to turn off the waterworks

When my mother died, almost exactly a year ago, I didn’t shed a single tear. Wild emotions were raging inside me — they still are — but even at her funeral my eyes stayed desert-dry.

By failing to show this most modern sign of grief, I’m in an unfashionable minority. Indeed, there are moments when I feel positively left out. It seems the traditional British stiff-upper lip — which used to apply to women as much as men in many contexts — has melted into a wobbling lower one. The whole nation, it seems, now suffers the weakness Liverpudlians call ‘having your bladder too near your eyes’.

The Oscars will soon be here, with the recurrent risk that some successful British winner will reprise Gwyneth Paltrow’s famously cringe-making blub in 1999.

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Actors, though, are sort of allowed to blub. But this ocular incontinence extends far wider. Youthful contestants on ITV’s X Factor prostrate themselves in hysterics before their judges (‘Please, please, Simon, I want this so much’) as if they were begging for the life of a loved one, rather than just a place in next week’s sing-off.

Footballers who miss a penalty explode into the same lachrymose tantrums we once used to think so hilariously pathetic in Continental and Latin-American players.

Politicians — once such an impassive breed — now make shameless use of ‘the welling-up moment’. Even Peter Mandelson has done it (although the moisture at the corners of those cobra eyes was more likely to be undiluted battery acid).

Certainly, tidal emotion is justifiable in Chilean miners’ wives seeing their menfolk rescued, or Queenslanders surveying flood-devastated homes, or young Egyptians celebrating the triumph of their pro-democracy protest.

But here we’re talking about the crying of B-list celebrities on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, discovering their great-great-grandfathers were factory workers, and Masterchef finalists whose souffles have gone flat.

It’s highly politically incorrect, I know, but don’t you just want to pick them up and shake them?

This whole weepy phenomenon (if you’ve just been crying, you will pronounce that ‘fedobedod’) was aired recently in a BBC documentary, For Crying Out Loud, presented by the stand-up Jo Brand — who, appropriately enough, was once a psychiatric nurse.

It was an interesting programme, revealing Brand as considerably wittier and more perceptive than her stage-routines suggest (Recent sample from the latter: ‘What’s my favourite type of man? A dead one.’)

And since jokes about her size are the basis of her comedy act — and her own sexist quips pull no punches — I can confirm that she gives extra resonance to the word ‘blubber’.

Her documentary’s main revelation was that, for the British, wholesale sobbing is not new. In earlier centuries, people had no inhibitions about shedding tears in public — whether of grief or joy: men as freely as women.

The loss of Horatio Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 sent the whole nation into paroxysms of grief, while the calculated ‘weepy’ scenes in Charles Dickens’s novels had them bawling in the streets.

Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist listed the beneficial effects of a good cry in terms no modern therapist would dispute: ‘It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes and softens down the temper.’

As a self-appointed ‘historian of crying’, Brand tells us that it wasn’t until the early 20th century that we Brits put a cap on weeping.

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The reason? In the space of 30 years the country went through two world wars, in which grief, pain and trauma were so omnipresent that there was simply no point in displaying them.

Watching the promiscuous tear-shedding on television today, I can’t help thinking of those stoical men, women and children 70 years ago, who endured the Blitz, Atlantic convoys or PoW camps without so much as a self-pitying sniffle.

Where it started: First there came the unexpected
glitter of a tear in Margaret Thatcher’s eye when she announced her retirement on the steps of Downing St in 1991, right, and then there was Paul Gascoigne’s cry-baby moment during the 1990
World Cup semi-final

That much-mocked stiff upper lip was often a badge of amazing
courage. Even today, when we see an example of dry-eyed bravery and
dignity we are lost in admiration.

Stiff upper lips certainly
ruled my Fifties childhood, when squalling toddlers were apt to be
told: ‘Shut up or you’ll get something to cry about.’ And there was no
worse stigma for a boy than being called a ‘cry-baby’.

When, at
the age of 11, I saw my family fall apart and was sent to a Dickensian
boarding school, I gave no sign of my true feelings, either to my
parents or teachers.

Only late at night — when everyone else in
the dormitory was asleep — would I indulge myself in an extended weep,
taking care not to make a sound. To be caught crying would have been
shameful indeed.

It wasn’t until the Nineties, Brand tells us, that two public — and
very unlikely — instances of crying encouraged Britons to put their
hearts back on their sleeves.

First there came the unexpected
glitter of a tear in Margaret Thatcher’s eye when she was ousted from
office. The second was Paul Gascoigne’s cry-baby moment during the 1990
World Cup semi-final (though later life has brought him far more to blub
about).

Two seemingly insignificant incidents, I know. But the
death of Princess Diana in 1997 showed how fervently the country had
absorbed the lesson. On the day of her funeral, as the sad cortege
passed through London’s streets, we saw mass keening and
breast-beating.

Only the Queen seemed to be sticking to the stiff upper up, and her throne palpably tottered as a result.

Another powerful factor is the massive ego-growth in a nation once largely content to live in colourless anonymity. Your average 21st-century Briton tends to consider him or herself the centre of the universe. We are the star in our own movie: an Oscar-winner — complete with tears — every day of the week.

Television encourages this delusion. Reality shows — which promise to make celebrities of ordinary people — are especially to blame. For, in truth, contestants are subjected to such extremes of cruelty and anxiety that emotional overspill is inevitable.

So it is that we have become a namby-pamby nation, whose once-proud Royal Navy is now too wimpish to rescue an elderly British couple abducted by pirates and whose police are told not to go into parks at night because it’s too dark.

Of course, some situations entitle anyone to cry: the birth of a baby, the funeral of a parent (here’s me feeling left out again) or looking through photographs of happy times.

One can weep at the perfection of a work of art, at some evergreen tragedy — like the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald when he was only 44 — or simply when surveying the incalculable heap of human misery that constitutes ‘the past’.

Lest you think me the Tin Man of English letters, I confess to doing so — time after time — during the second act of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel or when reading the final paragraph of James Joyce’s short story The Dead.

Actually, I’d better stop there. I’m getting all misted up.

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Oh do stop blubbing! As a TV show reveals how we've become a nation of cry babies, PHILIP NORMAN says it's time to turn off the waterworks